I really enjoyed Scott's article on his highlights from the architect track at Tech Ed U.S. I couldn't resist some of his quotes, which reminded me of debates I've had with many of your over the past 12 months. Don’t let my quote pinching prevent you from reading the full article.

"There is a black hole of software know-how in the space between services and application that might be big enough to swallow an organization’s service-orientation efforts whole"

"the application architects have left the building and it’s becoming ever more evident that the lunatics may have been left to take over the asylum"

"As evidenced by enterprise architects who are inappropriately resorting to driving concrete implementation guidance from a higher-levels of abstraction into a lower level of abstraction, the discreteness of the boundary between services and applications has yet to be drawn with a sufficiently firm hand"

Have we all become Enterprise Architect, "who are inappropriately resorting to driving concrete implementation guidance from a higher-levels of abstraction into a lower level of abstraction”? What do you think?

Are Microsoft talking out both sides of our mouth - SO principles from the Indigo and Arch teams, and tightly coupled RAD development from the Visual Studio teams? It would certainly explain much of the emotion I get from developers when I talk SO. As Scott says, there is consensus around message orientation but I often get strong push back from developers lacking guidance on building apps to live in the SO universe with current tools.